Sexual Inversion Among Rulers

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Sexual Inversion Among Rulers

Moll, Raffalovich and Ludwig Frey find traces of homosexuality in the lives of various sovereigns, notably those of the Sultan, Baber; Henry III of France; Edward II, William II, James I and William III of England; and, probably, also in the lives of Queen Anne and George III. The sexuality of Elizabeth, the "Virgin Queen," although undoubtedly strong, appears to have followed normal channels; but during the regime of the two chief spirits of the "Alliance des trois Cotillons," * Maria Theresa in Austria, and Madame de Pompadour in France, there is hardly a doubt that, amid the other vices of the times, homosexual practices were not only common at the courts of the reigning monarchs, but in the private Uvea of those sovereigns themselves.

Jacoby and other writers have traced, very clearly, the hereditary tendencies in monarehial families to this species of degeneration; showing that William Rufus was undoubtedly a sexual invert; that at most Oriental powers due to sexual debauchery always demands fresh agencies of stimulation.

If this be so, the labors of those who have set in motion two distinct currents of opinion respecting homosexuality must be pronounced largely nugatory. On the one Bide, Binet, Schrenk-Notzing and others, seeking to enlarge the sphere of the acquired, in accounting for sexual inversion, have been met by the equally able psychologists, Krafft-Ebing, Moll and F4re*, with the opinion that it is congenital. Probably a sound and safe way to regard the sexual instinct is to place it upon the same basis as any other of our instincts—appetite, for example; and, pursuing the analogy, compare the inverted instinct with the inverted taste; which, as in the case of clay-eaters for example, sometimes exists for abnormal kinds of food. Thus the omnivorous instinct of the chicken, devouring everything that comes in its way, may be likened to the normal sexual instinct at puberty; the sexual invert corresponding to the same chicken, carrying into adult life its appetite for rags and waste-paper; or to a grown man preferring the nursing-bottle to roast beef.

Although a tacit belief in the idea of eongenitality seems to be fairly widespread, Ulrichs, so far as I know, was the only writer to frame a distinct postulate, whatever its correctness or incorrectness, for the phenomena under discussion. This postulate is, that the male invert's body co-exists with a female soul: anima muliebris in corpore virili inetusa; and, indeed, some writers, notably Magnan and Gley, partially adopting the phrase, have regarded inversion in the female brain as associated with a certain degree of masculinity in the procreative organs.

Ulrichs, however, merely crystallizes into an epigram what is not only entirely insusceptible of proof, but opposed by the fact that, in a large proportion of cases, sexual inversion exists without any marked modification oj the external organs; and that, equally, in male inverts the feminine psychic manifestations may be, and frequently are, wholly absent.